1 Notmuch 0.11 (2012-01-13)
2 =========================
9 Hooks have been introduced to notmuch. Hooks are scripts that notmuch
10 invokes before and after certain actions. Initially, "notmuch new"
11 supports "pre-new" and "post-new" hooks that are run before and after
12 importing new messages into the database.
14 notmuch reply --decrypt bugfix
16 The "notmuch reply" command with --decrypt argument had a rarely
17 occurring bug that caused an encrypted message not to be decrypted
18 sometimes. This is now fixed.
23 Automatic tag query optimization
25 "notmuch tag" now automatically optimizes the user's query to
26 exclude messages whose tags won't change. In the past, we've
27 suggested that people do this by hand; this is no longer necessary.
29 Don't sort messages when creating a dump file
31 This speeds up tag dumps considerably, without any loss of
32 information. To replicate the old behavior of sorted output (for
33 example to compare two dump files), one can use e.g. sort(1).
38 Reduction of memory leaks
40 Two memory leaks when searching and showing messages were identified
41 and fixed in this release.
48 notmuch-show-advance (bound to the spacebar in notmuch-show-mode) had
49 a bug that caused it to always jump to the next message, even if it
50 should have scrolled down to show more of the current message instead.
53 Support "notmuch new" as a notmuch-poll-script
55 It's now possible to use "notmuch new" as a notmuch-poll-script
56 directly. This is also the new default. This allows taking better
57 advantage of the "notmuch new" hooks from emacs without intermediate
60 Improvements in saved search management
62 New saved searches are now appended to the list of saved searches,
63 not inserted in front. It's also possible to define a sort function
64 for displaying saved searches; alphabetical sort is provided.
66 Hooks for notmuch-hello
68 Two new hooks have been added: "notmuch-hello-mode-hook" (called after
69 entering notmuch-hello-mode) and "notmuch-hello-refresh-hook" (called
70 after updating a notmuch-hello buffer).
72 New face for crypto parts headers
74 Crypto parts used to be displayed with a hardcoded color. A new face
75 has been introduced to fix this: notmuch-crypto-part-header. It
76 defaults to the same value as before, but can be customized to match
79 Use space as default thousands separator
81 Large numbers in notmuch-hello are now displayed using a space as
82 thousands separator (e.g. "123 456" instead of "123,456"). This can be
83 changed by customizing "notmuch-hello-thousands-separator".
85 Call notmuch-show instead of notmuch-search when clicking on
88 New function notmuch-show-advance
90 This new function advances through just the current thread, and is
91 less invasive than notmuch-show-advance-and-archive. It can easily
94 (define-key notmuch-show-mode-map " " 'notmuch-show-advance)
96 Various performance improvements.
101 The tool contrib/notmuch-deliver helps with initial delivery and
102 tagging of mail (replacing running notmuch new).
105 Notmuch 0.10.2 (2011-12-04)
106 ===========================
111 Fix crash in python bindings.
113 The python bindings did not call g_type_init, which caused crashes
114 for some, but not all users.
116 Notmuch 0.10.1 (2011-11-25)
117 ===========================
124 Argument processing changes in 0.10 introduced a bug where "notmuch
125 --help" crashed while "notmuch help" worked fine. This is fixed in
128 Notmuch 0.10 (2011-11-23)
129 =========================
131 New build and testing features
132 ------------------------------
134 Emacs tests are now done in dtach. This means that dtach is now
135 needed to run the notmuch test suite, at least until the checking for
136 prerequisites is improved.
138 Full test coverage of the stashing feature in Emacs.
140 New command-line features
141 -------------------------
143 Add "notmuch restore --accumulate" option
145 The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be
146 applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from
149 Add search terms to "notmuch dump"
151 The dump command now takes an optional search term much like notmuch
152 search/show/tag. The output file argument of dump is deprecated in
153 favour of using stdout.
155 Add "notmuch search" --offset and --limit options
157 The search command now takes options --offset=[-]N and --limit=N to limit
158 the number of results shown.
160 Add "notmuch count --output" option
162 The count command is now capable of counting threads in addition to
163 messages. This is selected using the new --output=(threads|messages) option.
165 New emacs UI features
166 ---------------------
168 Add tab-completion for notmuch-search and notmuch-search-filter
170 These functions now support completion tags for query parts
171 starting with "tag:".
173 Turn "id:MSG-ID" links into buttons associated with notmuch searches
175 Text of the form "id:MSG-ID" in mails is now a clickable button that
176 opens a notmuch search for the given message id.
178 Add keybinding ('c I') for stashing Message-ID's without an id: prefix
180 Reduces manual labour when stashing them for use outside notmuch.
182 Do not query on notmuch-search exit
184 It is harmless to kill the external notmuch process, so the user
185 is no longer interrogated when they interrupt a search.
190 Emacs now constructs large search buffers more efficiently
192 Search avoids opening and parsing message files
194 We now store more information in the database so search no longer
195 has to open every message file to get basic headers. This can
196 improve search speed by as much as 10X, but taking advantage of this
197 requires a database rebuild:
199 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
200 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
202 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
204 New collection of add-on tools
205 ------------------------------
207 The source directory "contrib" contains tools built on notmuch. These
208 tools are not part of notmuch, and you should check their individual
209 licenses. Feel free to report problems with them to the notmuch
212 nmbug - share tags with a given prefix
214 nmbug helps maintain a git repo containing all tags with a given
215 prefix (by default "notmuch::"). Tags can be shared by commiting
216 them to git in one location and restoring in another.
218 Notmuch 0.9 (2011-10-01)
219 ========================
221 New, general features
222 ---------------------
224 Correct handling of interruptions during "notmuch new"
226 "notmuch new" now operates as a series of small, self-consistent
227 transactions, so it can correctly resume after an interruption or
228 crash. Previously, interruption could lose existing tags, fail to
229 detect messages on resume, or leave the database in a state
230 temporarily or permanently inconsistent with the mail store.
237 notmuch_database_begin_atomic and notmuch_database_end_atomic allow
238 multiple database operations to be performed atomically.
240 notmuch_database_find_message_by_filename does exactly what it says.
244 notmuch_database_find_message (and n_d_f_m_by_filename) now return
245 a status indicator and uses an output parameter for the
246 message. This change required changing the SONAME of libnotmuch to
249 Python bindings changes
250 -----------------------
252 - Re-encode python unicode objects to utf-8 before passing back to
254 - Support Database().begin_atomic()/end_atomic()
255 - Support Database().find_message_by_filename()
256 NB! This needs a db opened in READ-WRITE mode currently, or it will crash
257 the python process. The is a limitation (=bug) of the underlying libnotmuch.
258 - Fixes where we would not throw NotmuchErrors when we should (Justus Winter)
259 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
261 Ruby bindings changes
262 ---------------------
264 - Wrap new library functions notmuch_database_{begin,end}_atomic.
265 - Add new exception Notmuch::UnbalancedAtomicError.
266 - Rename destroy to destroy! according to Ruby naming conventions.
267 - Update for n_d_find_message* API changes (see above).
272 * Add gpg callback to crypto sigstatus buttons to retrieve/refresh
274 * Add notmuch-show-refresh-view function (and corresponding binding)
275 to refresh the view of a notmuch-show buffer.
277 Reply formatting cleanup
278 ------------------------
280 "notmuch reply" no longer includes notification that non-leafnode
281 MIME parts are being suppressed.
283 Notmuch 0.8 (2011-09-10)
284 ========================
286 Improved handling of message/rfc822 parts
288 Both in the CLI and the emacs interface. Output of rfc822 parts now
289 includes the primary headers, as well as the body and all subparts.
290 Output of the completely raw rfc822-formatted message, including all
291 headers, is unfortunately not yet supported (but hopefully will be
294 Improved Build system portability
296 Certain parts of the shell script generating notmuch.sym were
297 specific to the GNU versions of sed and nm. The new version should
298 be more portable to e.g. OpenBSD.
300 Documentation update for Ruby bindings
302 Added documentation, typo fixes, and improved support for rdoc.
304 Unicode, iterator, PEP8 changes for python bindings
306 - PEP8 (code formatting) changes for python files.
307 - Remove Tags.__len__ ; see 0.6 release notes for motivation.
308 - Decode headers as UTF8, encode (unicode) database paths as UTF8.
310 Notmuch 0.7 (2011-08-01)
311 ========================
313 Vim interface improvements
314 --------------------------
316 Jason Woofenden provided a number of bug fixes for the Vim interface
318 * fix citation/signature fold lengths
319 * fix cig/cit parsing within multipart/*
320 * fix on-screen instructions for show-signature
321 * fix from list reformatting in search view
322 * fix space key: now archives (did opposite)
324 Uwe Kleine-König contributed
326 * use full path for sendmail/doc fix
327 * fix compose temp file name
329 Python Bindings changes
330 -----------------------
332 Sebastian Spaeth contributed two changes related to unicode and UTF8:
334 * message tags are now explicitly unicode
335 * query string is encoded as a UTF8 byte string
337 Build-System improvements
338 ------------------------
340 Generate notmuch.sym after the relevant object files
342 This fixes a bug in parallel building. Thanks to Thomas Jost for the
345 Notmuch 0.6.1 (2011-07-17)
346 ==========================
351 Re-export Xapian exception typeinfo symbols.
353 It turned out our aggressive symbol hiding caused problems for
354 people running gcc 4.4.5.
356 Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-01)
357 =======================
358 New, general features
359 ---------------------
360 Folder-based searching
362 Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
363 directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
364 storage). The syntax is as follows:
368 For example, one might use things such as:
374 to match any path containing a directory "spam", "work/todo", or
375 containing a directory starting with "2011-", respectively.
377 This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
378 software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
379 delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
380 Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
382 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
383 notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
384 this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
387 notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
388 # Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
390 notmuch restore notmuch.dump
394 Both the command line interface and the emacs-interface have new
395 support for PGP/MIME, detailed below. Thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor
396 and Jameson Graef Rollins for making this happen.
398 New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
400 These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
401 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
403 NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
404 notmuch will receive these tags.
406 New command-line features
407 -------------------------
408 Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
410 This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
411 PGP/MIME-signed parts.
413 Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
415 This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
416 Note that this feature currently requires gpg-agent and a passphrase entry
417 tool (e.g. pinentry-gtk or pinentry-curses).
419 Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
421 MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
422 MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
423 analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
424 which parts a signature part applies).
426 Add new "notmuch show --part" option
428 This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
429 is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
430 documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
431 of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
432 part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
435 Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
437 The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
438 addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
439 make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
440 it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
441 by translating it internally to the new call.
443 Performance improvements
444 ------------------------
445 Faster searches (by doing fewer searches to construct threads)
447 Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
448 performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
449 additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
451 Removing inefficiencies and redundancies in these secondary searches
452 results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
454 Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
456 Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
457 all message-document data rather than a pass for each data type)
458 results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
460 The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
461 optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
462 of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
463 1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
465 Faster initial indexing
467 More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
468 speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
469 rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
471 Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
473 Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
474 when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
475 last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
476 new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Karel Zak.
478 New emacs-interface features
479 ----------------------------
481 Support for PGP/MIME (GnuPG)
483 Automatically indicate validity of signatures for multipart/signed
484 messages. Automatically display decrypted content for
485 multipart/encrypted messages. See the emacs variable
486 notmuch-crypto-process-mime for more information. Note that this
487 needs gpg-agent and a pinentry tool just as the command line tools.
488 Also note there is no support SMIME yet.
490 Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
492 This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
493 "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
494 from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
495 previously they were silently hidden from the user).
497 User-selectable From address
499 A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
500 the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
501 press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
502 will prompt for the from address to use.
504 The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
505 notmuch customize group in order to use addresses other than those in
506 the notmuch configuration file if desired.
508 The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
509 when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
510 the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
513 Hiding of repeated subjects in collapsed thread view
515 In notmuch-show mode, if a collapsed message has the same subject as
516 its parent, the subject is not shown.
518 Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
520 When a message contains a line looking something like:
522 ----- Original Message -----
524 emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
525 (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
526 button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
527 citations work much like conventional citations.
529 New hooks for running code when tags are modified
531 Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
532 tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
533 example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
534 tool. To facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
535 modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
537 Notmuch Before Tag Hook
538 Notmuch After Tag Hook
540 New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
542 Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
543 multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
544 text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
546 Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
548 to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
549 automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
550 parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
551 because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
552 part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
554 Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
556 These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
559 Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
561 Replacing all characters with ASCII code less than 32 with a question mark.
563 Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
564 and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
566 Vim interface improvements
567 --------------------------
568 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface:
570 * Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
571 * Implementing archive in show view
572 * Add support to mark as read in show and search views
573 * Add delete commands
576 Bindings improvements
577 ---------------------
578 Ruby bindings are now much more complete
580 Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
581 MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
583 * Python bindings have been updated and extended
584 (docs online at http://packages.python.org/notmuch/)
587 - Message().get_filenames(),
588 - Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(),Message().maildir_flags_to_tags()
589 - list(Threads()) and list(Messages) works now
591 - Message().__cmp__() and __hash__()
592 These allow, for example:
595 As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
597 s1, s2= set(msgs1), set(msgs2)
602 - len(Messages()) as it exhausted the iterator.
603 Use len(list(Messages())) or
604 Query.count_messages() to get the length.
606 Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
608 New build-system features
609 -------------------------
610 Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
612 This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
613 the configure script from some other directory:
620 Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
622 When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
623 "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
624 this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
625 the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
626 manual invocation of configure.
628 New test-suite feature
629 ----------------------
630 Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
632 The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
633 bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
634 /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
635 the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
636 simply install bash >= 4 somewhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
639 Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
641 Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
642 presence/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
643 has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
644 test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
645 any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
646 are updated to take advantage of this.
648 Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
650 The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
651 allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
652 some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
653 due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
658 Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
660 For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
661 previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
662 command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
664 Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
666 This fixed a bug where a search for:
668 to:user@elsewhere.com
670 would incorrectly match a message sent:
672 To: user@example,com, someone@elsewhere.com
674 Fix --output=json when search has no results
676 A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
677 to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
678 return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
681 fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
682 from the Received headers in some cases.
684 Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
685 sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
687 Cleaned up several memory leaks
689 Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
691 Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
693 Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
694 C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
695 interface and were never intended to be exported.
697 Emacs-interface bug fixes
698 -------------------------
699 Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
701 Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
702 silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
703 very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug described below.
705 Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
707 When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
708 interface was incorrectly dropping one thread every time the output
709 of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacs read-buffer. This
712 Avoid re-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
714 Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
715 re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
716 (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
717 fixed to avoid this bug.
719 Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
721 Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
722 fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
724 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
725 ========================
726 New, general features
727 ---------------------
728 Maildir-flag synchronization
730 Notmuch now knows how to synchronize flags in maildir filenames with
731 tags in the notmuch database. The following flag/tag mappings are
740 'S' unread (added when 'S' flag is not present)
742 The synchronization occurs in both directions, (for example, adding
743 the 'S' flag to a file will cause the "unread" tag to be added, and
744 adding the "replied" tag to a message will cause the file to be
745 renamed with an 'R' flag).
747 This synchronization is enabled by default for users of the
748 command-line interface, (though only files in directories named
749 "cur" or "new" will be renamed). It can be disabled by setting the
750 new maildir.synchronize_flags option in the configuration file. For
753 notmuch config set maildir.synchronize_flags false
755 Users upgrading may also want to run "notmuch setup" once (just
756 accept the existing configuration) to get a new, nicely-commented
757 [maildir] section added to the configuration file.
759 For users of the notmuch library, the new synchronization
760 functionality is available with the following two new functions:
762 notmuch_message_maildir_flags_to_tags
763 notmuch_message_tags_to_maildir_flags
765 It is anticipated that future improvements to this support will
766 allow for safe synchronization of the 'T' flag with the "deleted"
767 tag, as well as support for custom flag/tag mappings.
771 Support for querying multiple filenames for a single message
773 It is common for the mailstore to contain multiple files with the
774 same message ID. Previously, notmuch would always hide these
775 duplicate files, (returning a single, arbitrary filename with
776 notmuch_message_get_filename).
778 With this release, library users can access all filenames for a
779 message with the new function:
781 notmuch_message_get_filenames
783 Together with notmuch_filenames_valid, notmuch_filenames_get, and
784 notmuch_filenames_move_to_next it is now possible to iterate over
785 all available filenames for a given message.
787 New command-line features
788 -------------------------
789 New "notmuch show --format=raw" for getting at original email contents
791 This new feature allows for a fully-functional email client to be
792 built on top of the notmuch command-line without needing any direct
793 access to the mail store itself.
795 For example, it's now possible to run "emacs -f notmuch" on a local
796 machine with only ssh access to the mail store/notmuch database. To
797 do this, simply set the notmuch-command variable in emacs to the
798 name of a script containing:
800 ssh user@host notmuch "$@"
802 If the ssh client has enabled connection sharing (ControlMaster
803 option in OpenSSH), the emacs interface can be quite responsive this
808 Fix "notmuch search" to print nothing when nothing matches
810 The 0.4 release had a bug in which:
812 notmuch search <expression-with-no-matches>
814 would produce a single blank line of output, (where previous
815 versions would produce no output. This fix also causes a change in
816 the --format=json output, (which would previously produce "[]" and
817 now produces nothing).
819 Emacs interface improvements
820 ----------------------------
821 Fix to allow pipe ('|') command to work when using notmuch over ssh
823 Fix count of lines in hidden signatures.
825 Omit repeated subject lines in (collapsed) thread display.
827 Display current thread subject in a header line.
829 Provide a "c i" binding to copy a thread ID from the search view.
831 Allow for notmuch-fcc-dirs to have a value of nil.
833 Also, the more complex form of notmuch-fcc-dirs now has a slightly
834 different format. It no longer has a special first-element, fallback
835 string. Instead it's now a list of cons cells where the car of each
836 cell is a regular expression to be matched against the sender
837 address, and the cdr is the name of a folder to use for an FCC. So
838 the old fallback behavior can be achieved by including a final cell
839 of (".*" . "default-fcc-folder").
841 Vim interface improvements
842 --------------------------
843 Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
845 These include optimizations, support for newer versions of vim, fixed
846 support for sending mail on modern systems, new commands, and
851 Added initial ruby bindings in bindings/ruby
853 Notmuch 0.4 (2010-11-01)
854 ========================
855 New command-line features
856 -------------------------
857 notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
859 This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
860 notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
861 just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
863 The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
864 tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
865 expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
866 scripts. For example:
868 for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
869 <operations-on> "$file"
872 notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
874 This new option allows for the messages matching a search
875 specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
876 format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
877 beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
878 beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
879 followed by the 5 characters "From ".
881 notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
883 The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
884 notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
885 single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
886 custom items stored in the configuration file.
888 Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
890 We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
891 user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
892 see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
893 default rather than Bcc.
897 Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
899 These are simply functions for querying properties of a
900 notmuch_query_t object.
904 Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
906 All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
907 notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
908 by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
909 "sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
910 can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
911 notmuch customize interface.
913 Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
915 Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
916 to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
917 argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
918 messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
920 Optional support for detecting inline patches
922 This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
923 under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
924 interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
925 as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
927 Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
929 Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
930 "replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
931 other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
932 "needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
933 that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
934 notmuch customize interface.
936 Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
938 For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
939 lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
940 both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
941 case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
942 notmuch customize interface.
944 Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
946 When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
947 in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
948 available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
949 searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
952 New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
954 Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
955 various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
956 etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
959 New build-system features
960 -------------------------
961 Various portability fixes have been applied
963 These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
964 and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
965 more portable than ever before.
967 Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
969 The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
970 errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
971 after installing. This support takes two forms:
973 1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
974 (configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
975 automatically run ldconfig.
977 2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
978 build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
979 pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
981 When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
982 immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
983 the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
984 variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
986 Check compiler/linker options before using them
988 The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
989 compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
990 embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
991 used in the resulting Makefile.
993 New test-suite features
994 -----------------------
995 New modularization of test suite.
997 Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
998 from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
999 provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
1000 rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
1001 test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
1002 (BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
1003 it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
1004 notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
1006 New testing of emacs interface.
1008 The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
1009 emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
1010 threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
1011 message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
1012 and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
1013 database via the FCC setting.
1017 Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
1019 Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
1020 in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
1021 persistent error of the form:
1023 document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
1025 The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
1026 avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
1028 Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
1030 Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
1031 than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
1032 Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
1034 Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
1036 Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
1037 GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
1038 parsing the notmuch results).
1040 Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
1042 Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
1044 Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
1045 exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
1046 returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
1050 Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
1052 Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
1053 square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
1054 output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
1055 mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
1056 the emacs interface.
1058 Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
1060 The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
1061 Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
1062 misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
1064 Python-binding fixes
1065 --------------------
1066 The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
1068 Debian-specific fixes
1069 ---------------------
1070 Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
1072 Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
1073 "apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
1074 edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
1077 Notmuch 0.3.1 (2010-04-27)
1078 ==========================
1081 Fix an infinite loop in "notmuch reply"
1083 This bug could be triggered by replying to a message where the
1084 user's primary email address did not appear in the To: header and
1085 the user had not configured any secondary email addresses. The bug
1086 was a simple re-use of the same iterator variable in nested loops.
1088 Fix a potential SEGV in "notmuch search"
1090 This bug could be triggered by an author name ending in a ','.
1091 Admittedly - that's almost certainly a spam email, but we never
1092 want notmuch to crash.
1096 Fix calculations for line wrapping in the primary "notmuch" view.
1098 Fix Fcc support to prompt to create a directory if the specified Fcc
1099 directory does not exist.
1103 Fix build on OpenSolaris (at least) due to missing 'extern "C"' block.
1105 Without this, the C++ sources could not find strcasestr and the
1106 final linking of notmuch would fail.
1108 Notmuch 0.3 (2010-04-27)
1109 ========================
1110 New command-line features
1111 -------------------------
1112 User-configurable tags for new messages
1114 A new "new.tags" option is available in the configuration file to
1115 determine which tags are applied to new messages. Run "notmuch
1116 setup" to generate new documentation within ~/.notmuch-config on how
1117 to specify this value.
1119 Threads search results named based on subjects that match search
1121 This means that when new mails arrived to a thread you've previously
1122 read, and the new mails have a new subject, you will see that
1123 subject in the search results rather than the old subject.
1125 Faster operation of "notmuch tag" (avoid unneeded sorting)
1127 Since the user just wants to tag all matching messages, we can make
1128 things perform a bit faster by avoiding the sort.
1130 Even Better guessing of From: header for "notmuch reply"
1132 Notmuch now looks at a number of headers when trying to figure out
1133 the best From: header to use in a reply. This is helpful if you have
1134 several configured email addresses, and you also subscribe to various
1135 mailing lists with different addresses, (so that mails you are
1136 replying to won't always include your subscribed address in the To:
1139 Indication of author names that match a search
1141 When notmuch displays threads as the result of a search, it now
1142 lists the authors that match the search before listing the other
1143 authors in the thread. It inserts a pipe '|' symbol between the last
1144 matching and first non-matching author. This is especially useful in
1145 a search that includes tag:unread. Now the authors of the unread
1146 messages in the thread are listed first.
1148 New: Python bindings
1149 --------------------
1150 Sebastian Spaeth has contributed his python bindings for the notmuch
1151 library to the central repository. These bindings were previously
1152 known as "cnotmuch" within python but have now been renamed to be
1153 accessible with a simple, and more official-looking "import notmuch".
1155 The bindings have already proven very useful as people proficient in
1156 python have been able to easily develop programs to do notmuch-based
1157 searches for email-address completion, maildir-flag synchronization,
1160 These bindings are available within the bindings/python directory, but
1161 are not yet integrated into the top-level Makefiles, nor the top-level
1162 package-building scripts. Improvements are welcome.
1164 Emacs interface improvements
1165 ----------------------------
1166 An entirely new initial view for notmuch, (friendly yet powerful)
1168 Some of us call the new view "notmuch hello" but you can get at it
1169 by simply calling "emacs -f notmuch". The new view provides a search
1170 bar where new searches can be performed. It also displays a list of
1171 recent searches, along with a button to save any of these, giving it
1172 a new name as a "saved search". Many people find these "saved
1173 searches" one of the most convenient ways of organizing their mail,
1174 (providing all of the features of "folders" in other mail clients,
1175 but without any of the disadvantages).
1177 Finally, this view can also optionally display all of the tags that
1178 exist in the database, along with a count for each tag, and a custom
1179 search of messages with that tag that's simply a click (or keypress)
1182 Note: For users that liked the original mode of "emacs -f notmuch"
1183 immediately displaying a particular search result, we
1184 recommend instead running something like:
1186 emacs --eval '(notmuch search "tag:inbox" t)'
1188 The "t" means to sort the messages in an "oldest first" order,
1189 (as notmuch would do previously by default). You can also
1190 leave that off to have your search results in "newest first"
1193 Full-featured "customize" support for configuring notmuch
1195 Notmuch now plugs in well to the emacs "customize" mode to make it
1196 much simpler to find things about the notmuch interface that can be
1197 tweaked by the user.
1199 You can get to this mode by starting at the main "Customize" menu in
1200 emacs, then browsing through "Applications", "Mail", and
1201 "Notmuch". Or you can go straight to "M-x customize-group"
1204 Once you're at the customize screen, you'll see a list of documented
1205 options that can be manipulated along with checkboxes, drop-down
1206 selectors, and text-entry boxes for configuring the various
1209 Support for doing tab-completion of email addresses
1211 This support currently relies on an external program,
1212 (notmuch-addresses), that is not yet shipped with notmuch
1213 itself. But multiple, suitable implementations of this program have
1214 already been written that generate address completions by doing
1215 notmuch searches of your email collection. For example, providing
1216 first those addresses that you have composed messages to in the
1219 One such program (implemented in python with the python bindings to
1220 notmuch) is available via:
1222 git clone http://jkr.acm.jhu.edu/git/notmuch_addresses.git
1224 Install that program as notmuch-addresses on your PATH, and then
1225 hitting TAB on a partial email address or name within the To: or Cc:
1226 line of an email message will provide matching completions.
1228 Support for file-based (Fcc) delivery of sent messages to mail store
1230 This isn't yet enabled by default. To enable this, one will have to
1231 set the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" setting within the notmuch customize
1232 screen, (see its documentation there for details). We anticipate
1233 making this automatic in a future release.
1235 New 'G' key binding to trigger mail refresh (G == "Get new mail")
1237 The 'G' key works wherever '=' works. Before refreshing the screen
1238 it calls an external program that can be used to poll email servers,
1239 run notmuch new and setup specific tags for the new emails. The
1240 script to be called should be configured with the "Notmuch Poll
1241 Script" setting in the customize interface. This script will
1242 typically invoke "notmuch new" and then perhaps several "notmuch
1245 Implement emacs message display with the JSON output from notmuch.
1247 This is much more robust than the previous implementation, (where
1248 some HTML mails and mail quoting the notmuch code with the delimiter
1249 characters in it would cause the parser to fall over).
1251 Better handling of HTML messages and MIME attachments (inline images!)
1253 Allow for any MIME parts that emacs can display to be displayed
1254 inline. This includes inline viewing of image attachments, (provided
1255 the window is large enough to fit the image at its natural size).
1257 Much more robust handling of HTML messages. Currently both text/plain
1258 and text/html alternates will be rendered next to each other. In a
1259 future release, users will be able to decide to see only one or the
1260 other representation.
1262 Each attachment now has its own button so that attachments can be
1263 saved individually (the 'w' key is still available to save all
1266 Customizable support for tidying of text/plain message content
1268 Many new functions are available for tidying up message
1269 content. These include options such as wrapping long lines,
1270 compressing duplicate blank lines, etc.
1272 Most of these are disabled by default, but can easily be enabled by
1273 clicking the available check boxes under the "Notmuch Show Insert
1274 Text/Plain Hook" within the notmuch customize screen.
1276 New support for searchable citations (even when hidden)
1278 When portions of overly-long citations are hidden, the contents of
1279 these citations will still be available for emacs' standard
1280 "incremental search" functions. When the search matches any portion
1281 of a hidden citation, the citation will become visible temporarily
1282 to display the search result.
1284 More flexible handling of header visibility
1286 As an answer to complaints from many users, the To, Cc, and Date
1287 headers of messages are no longer hidden by default. For those users
1288 that liked that these were hidden, a new "Notmuch Messages Headers
1289 Visible" option in the customize interface can be set to nil. The
1290 visibility of headers can still be toggled on a per-message basis
1291 with the 'h' keybinding.
1293 For users that don't want to see some subset of those headers, the
1294 new "Notmuch Message Headers" variable can be customized to list
1295 only those headers that should be present in the display of a message.
1297 The Return key now toggles message visibility anywhere
1299 Previously this worked only on the first summary-line of a message.
1301 Customizable formatting of search results
1303 The user can easily customize the order, width, and formatting of
1304 the various fields in a "notmuch search" buffer. See the "Notmuch
1305 Search Result Format" section of the customize interface.
1307 Generate nicer names for search buffers when using a saved search.
1309 Add a notmuch User-Agent header when sending mail from notmuch/emacs.
1311 New keybinding (M-Ret) to open all collapsed messages in a thread.
1315 Provide a new NOTMUCH_SORT_UNSORTED value for queries
1317 This can be somewhat faster when sorting simply isn't desired. For
1318 example when collecting a set of messages that will all be
1319 manipulated identically, (adding a tag, removing a tag, deleting the
1320 messages), then there's no advantage to sorting the messages by
1325 Fix to compile against GMime 2.6
1327 Previously notmuch insisted on being able to find GMime 2.4, (even
1328 though GMime 2.6 would have worked all along).
1330 Fix configure script to accept (and ignore) various standard options.
1332 For example, those that the Gentoo build scripts expect configure to
1333 accept are now all accepted.
1337 A large number of new tests for the many new features.
1339 Better display of output from failed tests.
1341 Now shows failures with diff rather than forcing the user to gaze at
1342 complete actual and expected output looking for deviation.
1344 Notmuch 0.2 (2010-04-16)
1345 ========================
1346 This is the second release of the notmuch mail system, with actual
1347 detailed release notes this time!
1349 This release consists of a number of minor new features that make
1350 notmuch more pleasant to use, and a few fairly major bug fixes.
1352 We didn't quite hit our release target of "about a week" from the 0.1
1353 release, (0.2 is happening 11 days after 0.1), but we hope to do
1354 better for next week. Look forward to some major features coming to
1355 notmuch in subsequent releases.
1361 Better guessing of From: header.
1363 Notmuch now tries harder to guess which configured address should be
1364 used as the From: line in a "notmuch reply". It will examine the
1365 Received: headers if it fails to find any configured address in To:
1366 or Cc:. This allows it to often choose the correct address even when
1367 replying to a message sent to a mailing list, and not directly to a
1370 Make "notmuch count" with no arguments count all messages
1372 Previously, it was hard to construct a search term that was
1373 guaranteed to match all messages.
1375 Provide a new special-case search term of "*" to match all messages.
1377 This can be used in any command accepting a search term, such as
1378 "notmuch search '*'". Note that you'll want to take care that the
1379 shell doesn't expand * against the current files. And note that the
1380 support for "*" is a special case. It's only meaningful as a single
1381 search term and loses its special meaning when combined with any
1384 Automatically detect thread connections even when a parent message is
1387 Previously, if two or more message were received with a common
1388 parent, but that parent was not received, then these messages would
1389 not be recognized as belonging to the same thread. This is now fixed
1390 so that such messages are properly connected in a thread.
1394 Fix potential data loss in "notmuch new" with SIGINT
1396 One code path in "notmuch new" was not properly handling
1397 SIGINT. Previously, this could lead to messages being removed from
1398 the database (and their tags being lost) if the user pressed
1399 Control-C while "notmuch new" was working.
1401 Fix segfault when a message includes a MIME part that is empty.
1403 Fix handling of non-ASCII characters with --format=json
1405 Previously, characters outside the range of 7-bit ASCII were
1406 silently dropped from the JSON output. This led to corrupted display
1407 of utf-8 content in the upcoming notmuch web-based frontends.
1409 Fix headers to be properly decoded in "notmuch reply"
1411 Previously, the user might see:
1413 Subject: Re: =?iso-8859-2?q?Rozlu=E8ka?=
1417 Subject: Re: Rozlučka
1419 The former text is properly encoded to be RFC-compliant SMTP, will
1420 be sent correctly, and will be properly decoded by the
1421 recipient. But the user trying to edit the reply would likely be
1422 unable to read or edit that field in its encoded form.
1424 Emacs client features
1425 ---------------------
1426 Show the last few lines of citations as well as the first few lines.
1428 It's often the case that the last sentence of a citation is what is
1429 being replied to directly, so the last few lines are often much more
1430 important. The number of lines shown at the beginning and end of any
1431 citation can be configured, (notmuch-show-citation-lines-prefix and
1432 notmuch-show-citation-lines-suffix).
1434 The '+' and '-' commands in the search view can now add and remove
1437 Selective bulk tagging is now possible by selecting a region of
1438 threads and then using either the '+' or '-' keybindings. Bulk
1439 tagging is still available for all threads matching the current
1440 search with the '*' binding.
1442 More meaningful buffer names for thread-view buffers.
1444 Notmuch now uses the Subject of the thread as the buffer
1445 name. Previously it was using the thread ID, which is a meaningless
1448 Provide for customized colors of threads in search view based on tags.
1450 See the documentation of notmuch-search-line-faces, (or us "M-x
1451 customize" and browse to the "notmuch" group within "Applications"
1452 and "Mail"), for details on how to configure this colorization.
1454 Build-system features
1455 ---------------------
1456 Add support to properly build libnotmuch on Darwin systems (OS X).
1458 Add support to configure for many standard options.
1460 We include actual support for:
1462 --includedir --mandir --sysconfdir
1464 And accept and silently ignore several more:
1466 --build --infodir --libexecdir --localstatedir
1467 --disable-maintainer-mode --disable-dependency-tracking
1469 Install emacs client in "make install" rather than requiring a
1470 separate "make install-emacs".
1472 Automatically compute versions numbers between releases.
1474 This support uses the git-describe notation, so a version such as
1475 0.1-144-g43cbbfc indicates a version that is 144 commits since the
1476 0.1 release and is available as git commit "43cbbfc".
1478 Add a new "make test" target to run the test suite and actually verify
1481 Notmuch 0.1 (2010-04-05)
1482 ========================
1483 This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.
1485 It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
1486 interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.
1488 Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or Xapian
1489 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether 1.0 or 1.1) had
1490 a performance bug that made notmuch very slow when modifying
1491 tags. This would cause distracting pauses when reading mail while
1492 notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing the "inbox" and "unread"
1493 tags from messages in a thread.